


pale wildwood flower

by WeeBeastie



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst and Feels, Bisexual Flint, Caring Captain Flint, Established Relationship, F/M, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, References to Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 16:10:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13930584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeeBeastie/pseuds/WeeBeastie
Summary: oh i long to see him and regret the dark hourhe’s gone and neglected his pale wildwood flower





	pale wildwood flower

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to a Tumblr prompt! Sorry it took me forever, ack. 
> 
> Writing this was also kind of cathartic for me for a variety of boring personal reasons, so maybe keep that in mind when you comment (or don’t, it’s up to you).
> 
> Lots of people have done covers of ‘Wildwood Flower,’ which is an American folk song first published in 1860, and just so happens to be where I got the title and summary for this story. I feel like it suits Miranda. 
> 
> Rated M but there’s nothing too explicit, just hinting. I wavered between an M and a T rating but decided there’s juuust enough going on to tip it over into M.

He’s been home - well, not _home_ , but with her in their cottage on the island - for little more than a month when it starts. 

“I need to go away again,” he says one bright morning over tea, his long fingers wrapped around a delicate porcelain cup. He’s not quite healed yet from the brawl he got into at the brothel a few nights ago; there’s a scabbed over cut on his cheek and a blue-green bruise under his left eye. 

“Why?” she hears herself ask, staring down into the dregs of her tea. Her voice sounds tired, resigned, to her own ears. She glances up at him, looking for the answer in his face. 

“Why?” he echoes, one eyebrow cocked. “Because it’s what I do. I can’t take prizes on land.”

“I know that,” she replies, irritated now, and rises from the table to return to their bedroom and dress for the day. 

He follows her, because of course he does. 

“I don’t leave here because I want to,” he says, standing in the doorway and politely averting his gaze to the ceiling as she steps out of her nightdress. Still vestiges of the proper Navy gentleman left in him, even after everything. “I leave because I have to. You know that,” he says. 

“I’m aware,” she says, letting him help her into her dress when he approaches. She doesn’t need him to help - has gotten quite used to doing things alone - but he’s here, now, so she’ll let him. He makes quick work of it. 

“I have to get the ship ready,” he says once she’s dressed, tucking her hair behind her ear and kissing her forehead gently, making something fragile splinter in her chest. “I’ll return by dark. If all goes according to plan, we’ll leave in a week’s time.”

He puts his clothes on, then, and when he’s stripped bare for a moment she sees in his freckles and the line of his shoulders the young man she met so many years ago. He’s still there, somewhere, her James. 

It’s well past dark, coming up on midnight, when he finally arrives home again. She’s awake, the winds howling around the cottage, rattling the shutters. She’s sitting up in bed and reading by the light of a single lantern when she hears the front door creak open, then light, quiet footsteps. He must think her asleep. 

“Oh, you’re awake,” he says from the doorway a moment later. He’s barefoot, holding his boots in one hand - if she had to guess, he took them off just outside the front door, to be more quiet. He looks a bit dirty and tired but otherwise no worse for the wear. No brawls this evening, then. 

She wants to say, ‘do you know how late it is?’ 

She wants to say, ‘where have you been?’

Instead, she closes the book and puts it to one side, smiling at him wearily. “Hello,” she says, as he sits on the edge of the bed and starts shedding his clothes. Once down to his breeches, he stretches, catlike, with a soft groan. Then he turns to her, and his face takes on that particular heavy-lidded, intent look that usually makes her spine tingle. 

As he leans in, she puts her hand up to his mouth. 

“No,” she says, not unkindly. 

He sits back, looking puzzled, clearly unsure of what to do with himself now that he’s been rebuffed. “Miranda-” he starts. 

“You said you’d be back by dark. I stayed up waiting for you, and now I’m tired. Goodnight, James,” she interrupts him, lying down with her back to him. 

He says nothing, just leans over her to extinguish the lantern. She feels him curl up behind her, not quite touching, and the last thing she hears before she falls asleep is his quiet sigh. 

When she wakes in the morning, he’s already gone. There’s an empty teacup on the table, and pinned underneath it is a note in his distinctive hand. 

‘My Sweet,’ it begins, ‘I’ve gone to prepare. Will return by no later than sundown. I promise.’ (‘promise’ has been underlined thrice) ‘Yours, J.’

She takes the note and folds it carefully, then tucks it away in the bodice of her dress. She resolves not to waste energy being cross with him - he’s promised to be home, and he’s a man of his word. Besides, she has a garden to tend to and piano lessons to give, no time for brooding. 

Of course, he’s not home by dark, nor is he home by midnight, this time. She sits at the table in her nightdress with a goblet of purple, cloyingly sweet red wine, not her first of the evening. The goblet is a souvenir from one of his prizes. He’d brought home two of them, with a bottle of French wine that made her feel lightheaded almost immediately, and then he’d made love to her on this very table. 

“Promises,” she mutters to herself, and knocks back the rest of the wine.

She goes to bed alone, and is sound asleep a scant few hours before dawn when she wakes at the sound of a clumsy pirate captain flinging open the front door. He hasn’t taken off his boots this time, and if the racket he’s making is any indication, he’s been into the wine, too. 

“I’m sorry,” he says when at last he arrives in the doorway of their bedroom, gripping the frame for balance. 

“You’re drunk,” she says flatly, and gets up from the bed. She can smell the alcohol on him even from a few paces away. 

“Hal took me out, said I looked like I could use a drink. Said my witch must’ve put a spell on me,” he says with a crooked little grin. He reaches for her but she draws no closer, incensed. “Let’s go t’bed.”

“No. Get out. You’re not sleeping in here tonight,” she says, folding her arms resolutely over her chest. 

“You’re _banishing_ me?” he asks, so incredulously she almost wants to laugh at him. “Miranda! You can’t banish me, ‘s my bed too.”

“I can and I have. Go sleep on your ship,” she snarls, and muscles him out of the doorway with no hesitation, slamming the door shut in his face. He’s lucky she didn’t slam it on him, she thinks viciously, and retreats to bed alone. Dimly she hears him walk away after a few minutes, and she wonders for a moment where he’ll sleep, then decides she doesn’t care. 

The next morning, he’s nowhere to be found. She half-expected to find him asleep sitting up at the table, or on his belly in the garden (both of which have happened before), but he’s gone. She dresses for the day and makes tea, and has just settled in with a book when the front door opens. 

There he is, her russet love, faintly green around the gills and sweating from the heat of the morning. In one hand he’s got a bouquet of wildflowers, and he’s schooled his face into its most contrite expression. 

“Miranda, my sweet,” he begins, approaching her, the posies held out like an olive branch. “I’m sorry.”

She snaps the book shut. “And?”

“I’m a shit,” he says as she stands from her chair, taking the proffered flowers from him. 

“And?” she says, sniffing them delicately. 

“You’re beautiful,” he murmurs, reaching for her. 

She stops him with a look. “And?”

Slowly, looking a bit pained, he drops to his knees in front of her. He slides his arms around her waist and rests his cheek on her stomach, and she lets him. 

“Please forgive me,” he says into the fabric of her dress, rubbing his cheek against her like a cat. “I can’t do this without you,” he says, his voice hoarse, and she knows it’s the truth. 

She pets his hair lightly with her free hand, looking down at him and taking in the scene: the most feared pirate captain in these waters, the indomitable Captain Flint, on his knees begging his witch for her forgiveness and acceptance. 

It’s not a bad look for him. 

“You realize you hurt me by not coming home,” she says, and waits for his murmured ‘yes’ before she continues. “And you realize, of course, that I’ve already suffered a lifetime’s worth of hurt, and should not like to subject myself to much more. Especially at the hand of one who’s suffered the same.”

“Yes,” he says emphatically, and climbs to his feet. He reaches for her again and this time she lets him embrace her, leaning on him and nuzzling behind his ear. 

She pulls back to look him in the eye, setting the flowers on the table to take his face in both hands. His eyes are bloodshot from drink and lack of sleep, but they’re still the same arresting green they’ve always been. 

“You, my dear, have fucked up,” she says, and takes more than a little pleasure in his startled laugh. He does so like it when her tongue turns filthy. “Not for the first time, nor the last. But I love you, and I choose to forgive you. Don’t give me cause to regret it.”

“I won’t. I promise I won’t, Miranda, thank you,” he says, and tips his head to rest his forehead on hers. “I see you,” he whispers. 

“I see you, too,” she says, and kisses him, at last.

They go to bed then, in the late morning, and stay there until late afternoon like the miscreants they are, reacquainting with each other. In the afterglow she lounges on her back in bed with his head on her chest, buzzing and sated, the covers thrown askew. 

“Valiant rally, my love, considering how awful you must feel after last night,” she compliments him, smirking, and runs her fingers through his hair. 

He makes a noise that’s part groan, part laughter, and curls himself closer around her. His fingers in her hair and his stubbly cheek rasping on the soft skin of her breast - these are the little things she misses when he’s gone. When he goes to sea and she’s left alone, and it feels like a peculiar sort of homesickness. 

“How long will you be gone this time?” she asks, and presses a kiss to the top of his head. 

“Only a few months,” he rumbles, drowsy now, predictably. “Hardly any time at all. You’ll blink and I’ll be home again.”

“Quite so,” she says, feeling sudden tears stinging her eyes that she doesn’t let fall. She’s gone to the docks before, to watch him sail away. He doesn’t know, has never seen her, to her knowledge. She wears her plainest clothes and a hat that shadows her face, and as his ship gets underway she can hear him shouting orders, can see him stalking on the deck like a predator. He’s at his most beautiful then. 

He falls asleep with his head cradled to her chest, his languid, trusting body curled around hers. She studies his sleeping face for a long time, committing to memory the pattern of his freckles and the sweep of his eyelashes, so she won’t forget while he’s away. 

A few days more and he’ll leave. She’ll kiss him goodbye at the door and he’ll promise to return safely, with something new just for her - a book or a ring or a length of pretty silk. She’ll watch him go, and in the long days between departure and return she’ll look out towards the sea and think of him, silently plead with the ocean to bring him back whole and alive. 

Her James.


End file.
